


Still Life (with the Spinario)

by AstridContraMundum



Series: After-comers Cannot Guess The Beauty Been [12]
Category: Endeavour (TV)
Genre: But Bix is not that easily deterred, Established Relationship, M/M, Meditations on art and the transience of life, Valentine's Day Fluff, Way to ruin the mood Morse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-04
Updated: 2021-02-04
Packaged: 2021-03-16 00:40:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29198523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstridContraMundum/pseuds/AstridContraMundum
Summary: It's Valentine's Day 1991, and Bix takes Endeavour on a surprise trip to Amsterdam, to see that painting.The real one.
Relationships: Joss Bixby/Endeavour Morse
Series: After-comers Cannot Guess The Beauty Been [12]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1152587
Comments: 10
Kudos: 21





	Still Life (with the Spinario)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kittblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittblue/gifts), [IamLittleLamb](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamLittleLamb/gifts), [ildivouber](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ildivouber/gifts).



“There,” Endeavour said. “There’s the real one. Does it live up to your expectations?”

“Are you sure it’s the real one?” Bixby asked, a wry smile playing just at the corner of his mouth.

“Yes,” Endeavour said.

They stood side by side in a high-ceilinged gallery of the Rijksmuseum, their shoulders nearly brushing but yet held carefully apart, contemplating the dark stretch of canvas before them—a rich and heavily-pigmented oil still-life set in a gilt frame on a wall of Prussian blue.

Despite the occasional click of heels against the tasteful oak floors, the museum was imbued with a certain sort of hush, the sort that Bixby typically associated with cathedrals—so much so that even the very _scent_ of the hush seemed to waft upon the air, light and chill and faintly redolent of wood polish. 

Bixby knew that he was supposed to feel it— some spark of reverence for a great and authentic work of art—but the painting before him didn’t look all that different from the one he had bought from that so-called art dealer years and years ago, back in the winter of ’67, really.

The plaster cast of the Hellenistic sculpture depicted in the top-left corner, that of a seated boy removing a thorn from the sole of his foot—the only bright splash of white against a dark muddle of objects—was just the same in both paintings, as was the book and the palette, the skull and crossed bones, the viola or violin or whichever the hell it was, left tossed onto the dusty floor.

Every item in both paintings matched one to one, much like a child’s game of Memory—in all of the self-same lines and curves and muddied earth tones.

Which was the real one?

Which was the copy?

Damned if Bix could tell how Endeavour had so quickly known the difference.

But known the difference, he had.

And he had wasted absolutely no time in telling him so, either.

Bix could still see Pagan in his mind’s eye, his hands braced on the tops of his thighs as he stooped to examine the painting, the incandescent lamp locked to the top of the canvas illuminating the red-gold hair, the sculpted face, the overlarge blue eyes that seemed to look right through him.

The thump and din of the party seemed to recede somewhere in the distance, as Bix’s universe narrowed and converged onto that lit point of Pagan’s sharp face, even as the man’s mouth curved into a condescending a smile.

_“It’s a fake. A copy. A good one, but…. The real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum. I’ve seen it.”_

Well.

What could Bix have said?

He had been right, after all. 

“I just thought I owed it to you,” Bixby said. “To make it up to you. You know. For being less than honest when we first met.”

Endeavour snorted softly.

“Less than honest? I suppose you might say that, yes, considering you didn’t tell me your real name for three years.”

Endeavour turned to him then, his brow furrowed, as if he didn’t quite know what to make of him.

“Why do you want to bring that up now? That was all years and years ago now. What does it matter?”

“Because I want things to be square with us,” Bixby said. “That’s all.”

Endeavour huffed another laugh.

“You didn’t have to drag me all the way to Amsterdam for _that.”_

There was a twist of disapproval in his mouth as he said the words—and it was true: he hadn’t been exactly ecstatic about the trip.

More and more it seemed Endeavour was relying on his notebooks, leaving hastily scribbled notes for himself next to the telephone or on the table by the door. He was definitely keen, these days, on keeping to his routine. A routine that did not include spur-of-the-moment trips to the Rijksmuseum.

But there was a gentleness, there, too, in that curve of Endeavour’s lips, in those stern blue eyes. As if to assure him that if there _had_ been any offence, it had long since been forgiven—even forgotten—long ago.

But Bixby hadn’t forgotten.

And, after all, the past _did_ matter, didn’t it? In moving forward?

It was only right for a man to settle his debts, before heading off on a new venture, before shaking hands and sealing a new deal.

“So…” Bixby asked, folding his arms as he took in the muddle of the painting. “What the devil is one to make of all this, anyway?”

“Vanitas Sill Life with the Spinario. By Pieter Claesz,” Endeavour said. “It’s part of a genre that was popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in the Low Countries. A work of art meant to illustrate the transience of life, the inevitability of death. A work meant to show how all earthly pleasures are ephemeral.”

Endeavour’s mouth twitched with a quirk of a smile.

“That the things of this world are all illusion, only so much smoke and mirrors.”

“Ah,” Bixby said.

It wasn’t exactly the mood Bix was going for, but..... 

Alright.

“The skull, for example,” Endeavour said, “is meant to stand in for a symbol of human mortality. The abandoned violin and the lute, to show that music is fleeting. The watch, the ticking of the clock, serves as a remembrance that the moments of our lives are numbered. The palette of paints, that canvases fade.” 

“Hmmm,” Bixby said. “And yet here we are, looking at it three hundred years later.”

Endeavour shrugged, as if he didn’t much care to weigh in on the matter one way or the other.

“You know what I think?” Bixby asked.

“What’s that?”

“I think the man simply wanted an excuse to paint a lot of nice things.”

Endeavour laughed then, and it was his old laugh, that unguarded one that sounded like water rushing against the dock in Oxfordshire.

“No,” Bixby protested, wanting Endeavour to hear him out. “You can see the hypocrisy, surely? _‘All these things are futile, pointless. And now I’m going to spend hours painting them.’_ Spend hours getting down just the way the light strikes the dark wood, just the way each section of a bisected lemon glistens with a yellow and almost obscene hyperreality.”

“And why?” Bix concluded. “Because it brings him pleasure to do so.”

“I’m not....” Endeavour began, his voice conciliatory. “It’s just ... many art historians would agree with you, actually. That the sensuous depiction of each item in these sorts of paintings _is_ rather at odds with the moralistic message allegedly meant to be imparted.” 

“Ah,” Bixby said.

For just a fraction of a moment, Bix had to admit it: he was stunned to find he might actually have been right on a matter typically seen as one solidly in Endeavour’s domain.

But then he smiled to himself, bouncing a bit on his heels, standing a bit taller.

Well, of course, he was.

Was there ever any doubt?

It was just as he had always known.

One hardly needed an Oxford education to make sense of this sort of thing. A thorough knowledge of human nature—such as any man might pick up at the tables—was more than enough to be going on with.

He was right about this Claesz fellow, no doubt about it.

And he was right about a lot of other things, too.

Endeavour might have known the truth of him from the very first, might have seen he was a fraud, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t been a two-way street.

Because Bixby had seen—in just one glimpse of that ascetic face belied by that lush mouth meant for kisses—the truth of Endeavour, too.

Could see from the very first that the bitter young man before him—blunt to the point of rudeness as he dismissed the provenance of his painting—secretly, in his very heart of hearts, almost despite himself, wasn’t all that opposed to a bit of magic, a bit of passion and of excess, a bit of sleight of hand.

When Bix had first discovered that the former policeman had a penchant for _opera_ all things, he could have laughed out loud. 

Oh, sweet Jesus.

And Endeavour had told _him_ it was possible to have too much of a good thing? 

“Now that you’ve satisfied your curiosity, can we go home?” Endeavour asked.

He sounded as cross as two sticks—so much so that Bix realized that Endeavour must have seen it, the foolish and reminiscent smile on his face. It was as if Endeavour had read his mind somehow, sensed that his amusement stemmed from something to do with _him._

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Bixby mused. “I thought we might go to Denmark.”

“Why?” Endeavour asked, hotly.

It was clear he was unhappy with the thought of going further in the opposite direction from his goal, but the disapproval in his voice held within it such a sweet echo of the night they met, that Bixby couldn’t help once more but to smile.

Bixby, in those days—in his very first as Joss Bixby—had always been so careful.

Of his suits, his hair, his pronunciation, his manners.

So careful of his mask.

But, yet—he didn’t quite understand it, he didn’t quite know why—there was something about Anthony Donn’s solemn and sour-faced school friend, that austere young man who wandered through his party like some classical old god who had come in from an ancient wood to stand in judgement of the bacchanalia around him—that made Bix want to dash the suave facade to hell, that made him want to play the clown.

To sweep a top hat from off a Roman bust and present himself with a flourish. To take his hydroplane flying right past the place where he sat on the end of Belborough’s dock and shower him in a spray of water.

To do _something,_ anything, ridiculous or outrageous—pull a gold gambling chip from behind his ear, or offer him a new car with the drop of a word—anything that might wrest a hint of a smile from the prematurely somber face.

And as it was then, so it was now.

A part of him knew that such drollery was sure only to further flare Endeavour’s impatience, but Bix could not stop his next move any sooner than he could stop himself from breathing.

With an elaborate flourish, he reached into Endeavour’s pocket and pretended to pull something out from it. Then he placed two items in the palm of Endeavour’s hand, curling his fingers shut around them, as he drew his own hand away.

Endeavour looked at him for a moment, perplexed, and then opened his hand to reveal two gold bands, resting in the center of his palm.

“What’s this?” Endeavour asked.

“What do you think it is?”

Endeavour said nothing, a cloud of confusion settling over his face.

It was hardly, after all these years, the reception Bix had banked on.

How could he possibly make it any clearer?

“What?” Bixby asked. “Are you going to make me go down on one knee?”

That seemed to grab his attention, anyway, to pull him out of his reverie. Endeavour turned his face away, as though embarrassed, but he was fighting a smile, too, as if he thought the idea funny as hell.

“Fine then,” Bixby said.

He took Endeavour’s hand in his and started to descend onto one knee, much like a knight errant, sending Endeavour whipping around at once, looking about with a face full of apology to any on-lookers. He cast a manic smile to a young couple whose attention had been caught by the scene, even as he grasped Bix’s arm, struggling to pull him upright.

“Don’t,” he hissed.

He was absolutely mortified, but he was laughing, too.

_“Don’t.”_

“Would you just…”

Bixby allowed himself to be guided up, and Endeavour scowled, giving him that look that always made Bix want to run a thumb over the lines creasing his forehead.

“It’s ridiculous,” Endeavour said. “I don’t see why you would want to make such a fuss over this. Why do we need a piece of paper to tell us what we already know? You’re a damned traditionalist, that’s all. Must be your Southern roots.”

“Yes,” Bixby said, with a trace of irony. “That must be it.”

Although, perhaps he _did_ have a point.

There are some things, Bix supposed, that simply stay with us, from our earliest days. Just as he had so often imagined that he heard the distinctive, five-note coo of the mourning dove on mornings heavy with mist, in the woods of Lorraine.

Because he couldn’t really give Endeavour a reason .... could not really say why it should matter to him so, other than….

Well...

It was just what you _do,_ isn’t it?

He would have asked him years ago, that very first summer they met, if he had been able.

He never had been a believer in long engagements, preferring by far to live in the impulse of the moment.

“So, what do you say, then, old man?” Bixby asked, softly. “Shall we?” 

Endeavour said nothing, only continued to contemplate the bands, tilting them so that they caught the light, the perplexity in his features dawning into a still sort of wonder, one that Bix took for an encouraging sign.

Unlike him, Endeavour always did need time to mull things over.

“Well?” Bixby prompted.

“I dunno,” Endeavour said slowly. “I just never thought I’d find myself in this position, I suppose.”

Bix huffed a laugh.

“You could ask me. If you’d like.”

“Maybe I will,” Endeavour said.

It sounded a bit more like a threat than a promise, but either way, Bix couldn’t say he wasn’t intrigued.

Endeavour tilted his hand again, as if weighing the rings in the cup of his palm, and then a smile of recognition, of an old fondness, lit his face.

“You got them engraved with our initials,” he said, seemingly delighted by this detail, and Bix knew at once that he was remembering his old one-time mania for it—for splashing his initials, joined in a bold Art Deco font, hither and yon, as if he were a brand, rather than a man. On the twin half-stages set up in the Great Hall, on the pocket of his silk pajamas, even on the tail of his red hydroplane.

But then Endeavour’s smile faded once more, with a change like the shadow of clouds falling on sun-lit water.

_“JB?”_ he asked.

Bixby shrugged.

“It’s what you call me, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but….”

He shook his head.

“Never mind.”

Endeavour raised his face to look at him, then, and, as he did, his eyes were clear and blue and solemn.

He took his hand in his, his fingers brushing Bix’s knuckles with a softness like the brush of feathers, lifting it up as if he was preparing to give him his ring right there and then.

“Not here,” Bixby said, drawing his hand away.

Endeavour paused mid-motion, and his face, newly determined, fell back into lines of retreat.

“What?”

“We’re supposed to wait,” Bixby said. “Until it’s all official. You keep mine and I’ll keep yours. And then we give them to one another after the ceremony. That’s how it’s done, isn’t it?”

“Oh,” Endeavour said. There was a faintness to the syllable, a melancholy, that left Bixby to wonder where he had misstepped.

“What is it?” Bixby prompted.

“I dunno. I just wouldn’t want to… ,” Endeavour began.

And then his face turned stern, falling into that old expression of austere lines and cold, classical grace.

“Just carrying them about, leaving them to rattle around all the way to Denmark. You know how careless you can be. It would be a shame if you lost mine. That’s all.”

By the end of this little speech, Endeavour had come to scowl at some point on the floor, as if some knot in the trendy white oak floor had gravely offended him.

“Ah,” Bixby said.

It was another turn in the long dance between them, then, another arabesque cast under the glow of soft party lights.

And when was the first time that Bix had thrown one of those damned notes away, when he had realized Endeavour had been repeating the same task over and over?

But it was all right.

Fair was fair.

Wasn’t as if Endeavour hadn’t put up with Bix’s own charade for decades now.

“Probably safest we do it now, then, old man.”

Endeavour smiled, a trace of unspoken gratitude there on his face, as he reclaimed his hand.

And Endeavour was right.

This was the perfect place, really.

How apropos that this moment should unfold in front of the same painting where they had each recognized within the other what was false and what was true, even if they never spoke of it to anyone else, or even to one another.

Except, of course, it wasn’t the same painting, exactly. 

This was the real one.

Endeavour’s smile faded, his face falling back into solemn lines as he took Bix’s hand into his—and, even though it was a simple and familiar enough act—there was something different there, too.

Perhaps, even now, after all of this time, Bixby wasn’t quite prepared for it. Or perhaps it was simply because he had been so immersed in the atmosphere of the museum—of climate-controlled chill and of echoing hush.

But there was something new, in the feel of Endeavour’s hand on his, something warm that went straight through him, leaving him with a swooping sensation low in his gut. 

Endeavour raised his hand and slipped the ring onto the end of his fourth finger. He struggled, just for a moment, over the knuckle, but then he slid the gold band home, right over the vein that, tradition holds, runs straight to the heart. 

It was a moment that even Bix—ever the eternal optimist—had almost given up on hoping for. But now that it had happened, he felt strangely bereft, his heart heavy with an aching sense of incompletion.

As much as he had wanted to draw the moment out, to linger in the afterglow, he wanted even more to seal the deal.

He took Endeavour’s hand in his, and, again, he felt unprepared for it, for the way his thumb sank into the warm pad of Endeavour’s palm, for the press of his fingertips against his knuckles as he lifted his hand.

He slid the ring onto his finger, and the ease with which it slipped on—the realization that he had sized it right, that he knew Endeavour’s hand better than his own—felt like a fresh new surge of vindication.

For a moment, they simply stood there, saying nothing, the gold bands on their hands gleaming in the museum’s artificial low light.

It was true, they were simply material things, these rings, just like the jumble of objects in that still life by Claesz.

But what did they know, the poets and the painters who so belittled the things of this world, who spoke ill of that dull sublunary love, the sort that cared for hands and lips and eyes to miss?

How else can we know if not through the body?

How else can we love, if not through these hands and eyes?

There were some, he knew—even Endeavour himself perhaps among them— who might say he was merely a sensualist, a shallow epicurean, but Bixby, in that moment, felt he knew the truth of it.

There is a love that is of this world and a love that is timeless, that reaches somehow beyond.

But there is a third point that is more sacred still—a point where the two worlds, where once they meet, sends the soul soaring on bold-bright wings, the color of that gold to airy thinness beat, even while the body is held firm to earth, in the clasp of a warm hand, in the circle of a lover’s embrace.

Just as they had been brought full circle, standing before this painting full of things that did not last, but which _had_ lasted, just the same.

“Well,” Endeavour said. “I was right, you know.”

Bixby huffed a laugh.

“About what, old man?”

Endeavour moved in towards him, then, taking one step closer, closing that careful gap between them.

“The real one hangs in the Rijksmuseum,” he said. “I’ve seen it.”

Endeavour turned away, then, casting one swift look over his shoulder, and Bixby suddenly felt strangely anchorless, as if he were buoying on rough water.

But then, Endeavour was spinning back around to him. And again—Bix hadn’t expected it, wasn’t prepared for it—but in the next moment, Endeavour was propelling himself forward, sealing their mouths together in a kiss, full of a bright warmth and a softness and a waft of that familiar scent of autumn leaves that always seemed to linger in Endeavour’s hair.

Bix had barely the time to catch his breath, when Endeavour dipped in further, just at the corner of his mouth, with a swiftness and a fervor that Bix could only name as a thrilling new tinge of ownership.

As if to confirm it, Endeavour raised his left hand to rest it lightly on his chest, so that Bix could feel the cool weight of it through his shirt, of the ring on the hand that lay over his heart. 

And even as he stood, lost in a moment he wished could stretch on into forever, a part of him knew he should pull away—anxious with the knowledge that their sanctuary in his quiet hall of Old Dutch masters could hardly be theirs alone forever.

But Bix couldn’t help but to lose himself to the kiss, a kiss that—as foolish and cliched as it was to say—seemed to carry within it all of the spark and wonder of fireworks in a night sky.

It was an impression made so real that he could almost imagine that he was back at Lake Silence, lifting a glass of champagne as the sky erupted into golden starbursts behind him, into bright embers of flame that sizzled and snapped and spent themselves in a sound that …. in this moment …. sounded strangely like nothing so much as the glittering clatter of applause.

**Author's Note:**

> I should say that Bix is sampling a few lines from John Donne’s “Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” I gave poor Hopkins a break this year. :0)
> 
> Thanks for reading! <3


End file.
